REVIEW – Independence Day: Resurgence

Independence Day: Resurgence is a 2016 American science fiction adventure film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Emmerich, Dean Devlin, Nicolas Wright, James A. Woods and James Vanderbilt. It is the sequel to the 1996 film Independence Day and stars an ensemble cast featuring Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Jessie Usher, Maika Monroe, Travis Tope,William Fichtner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner and Sela Ward.

The film is set twenty years after the events of the first film. Since then, the United Nations have collaborated on the Earth Space Defense (ESD), an international military defense and research organization, and developed hybrid technology reverse-engineered from the invaders' in anticipation that they would return. When the returning aliens again attack Earth with an advanced and unprecedented force during the twentieth anniversary of humanity's victory against them on July 4, a new generation of defenders from the ESD joins forces with the surviving protagonists from the first film to participate in a battle to save the world from annihilation. In addition, humanity begins to explore their extraterrestrial adversary's history and motives.

Cast:

Liam Hemsworth as Jake Morrison
Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson
Jessie Usher as Dylan Dubrow-Hiller
Bill Pullman as Thomas J. Whitmore
Maika Monroe as Patricia Whitmore
Sela Ward as Elizabeth Lanford
William Fichtner as Joshua T. Adams
Judd Hirsch as Julius Levinson
Patrick St. Esprit as Reese Tanner
Vivica A. Fox as Jasmine Dubrow-Hiller
Angelababy as Rain Lao
Charlotte Gainsbourg as Dr. Catherine Marceaux
Deobia Oparei as Dikembe Umbutu
Nicolas Wright as Floyd Rosenberg
Travis Tope as Charlie Miller
Ng Chin Han as Jiang Lao
Gbenga Akinnagbe as Agent Matthew Travis
Robert Loggia as General William Grey
John Storey as Dr. Milton Isaacs
Joey King as Samantha "Sam" Blackwell
James A. Woods as Lieutenant James Ritter
Robert Neary as Captain McQuaide

Plot: (FULL Spoilers)

Look at all of the new VeriTech ESD fighters...

Twenty years after a devastating alien invasion, the United Nations has set up the Earth Space Defense (ESD), a global defense and research program to reverse-engineer alien technology and serve as Earth's early warning system against extraterrestrial threats. The main defense force utilizes equipment salvaged from the remains of the alien forces and operates military bases built on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea. The Area 51 base in Nevada has become the ESD Headquarters.

On July 2, 2016, the world is preparing to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their survival after the invasion. In the provincial African state Republique Nationale d'Umbutu, ESD Director David Levinson meets with Dr. Catherine Marceaux and warlord Dikembe Umbutu, who leads him to an intact alien destroyer. Aboard the ship, they discover that the alien occupants sent a distress call to their home planet before being defeated. Furthermore, Umbutu, former U.S. President Thomas Whitmore, and Dr. Brackish Okun (who awakens at Area 51 after a twenty-year coma) - all of them once telepathically linked with the aliens ever since their personal encounters with them - have of late been receiving strange visions of an unidentifiable spherical object.

It kills me that they made the ESD fighters and alien pods almost completely the same
in these dogfights. 

On July 3, a spherical ship with technology different from the aliens' emerges from a wormhole near the ESD's Moon defense headquarters. Levinson believes that it belongs to another extraterrestrial race that might be benevolent and urges the world's Security Council not to attack, but they vote to shoot it down regardless.

On July 4, against ESD's orders, pilots Jake Morrison and Charlie Miller pick up Levinson, Marceaux, Umbutu, and Levinson's accountant Floyd Rosenberg on a space tug and they head for the wreckage, where they recover a container. An alien mothership 3,000 miles (4,800 km) in diameter suddenly emerges and destroys Earth's planetary defenses before approaching the planet. The space tug is caught in the mothership's gravitational pull, which lifts objects from across Asia. The debris falls all over Europe, where the tug manages to escape before heading on to Area 51. The mothership lands over the north of the Atlantic Ocean, destroying cities on the Eastern Seaboard, and begins drilling a hole through the bottom of it to harvest the heat of the core for fuel, which will destroy Earth's magnetic field in the process.

Whitmore interrogates one of the aliens held in captivity from the war. The ESD learns that the aliens exist in eusociality, and that one of their colossal Queens is commanding the invasion. Levinson concludes that, if they kill the supervising Queen, her forces will cease drilling and retreat. An ESD aerial fleet, led by Captain Dylan Dubrow-Hiller, stages a counterattack on the Queen's chamber, but they are caught in a trap within the mothership, which nearly wipes out the entire unit.

In Area 51, Okun opens the container and releases a giant white sphere of virtual intelligence; indeed benevolent, it reveals that its mission is to evacuate survivors from worlds targeted by the aliens, whom it calls "Harvesters", and that it has gathered a viable resistance force against the Harvesters. In the mothership, Dylan, Jake, and other survivors manage to escape by hijacking enemy attack crafts and pursue the Queen's personal ship, which is heading to Area 51 with its convoy.

Knowing the Queen has become aware of the sphere's presence; the ESD forces hide it in an isolation chamber and use a decoy to lure the Queen's ship to a trap filled with fusion weapons. Against his daughter Patricia's wishes, Whitmore volunteers to pilot the space tug on the suicide mission, leading the warship to the trap and detonating the bombs, thus sacrificing himself and destroying the ship. However, the Queen survives using an energy shield on her biomechanical suit. Patricia personally flies a hybrid fighter that neutralizes the Queen's shield, allowing Dylan's arriving party to kill the Queen before she can take the sphere. With the Queen dead, the mothership stops drilling and retreats to space. Okun reveals that the sphere has asked humanity to lead its resistance and that the sphere offers new technology in preparation for a counterattack to assault their enemy's home world.

The Verdict:

This is would be a pretty straight-forward review as this film is the perfect example of how to revitalize an aging film franchise. Right off the bat, it was cool to see a lot of the original ID4 cast members make appearances in this film, especially Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum. Vivica Fox was there to get her paycheck too even though she got killed off after roughly of five minutes (if that…) of screen time. The new cast members were hit or miss for the most part, but I warmed up to them by the film’s finale. I just couldn’t stand that they made them into the common archetypes and character tropes – the nervous, unsure leader, the loose cannon, the nerd who just happens to be the tech expert, the female bad ass, and oh wait, the hot Asian chick who just happens to be good at everything.

You could tell that the writers of this sequel were obviously fans of the original film as there’s a lot of homages and tributes scattered throughout of this film of the noteworthy and memorable moments from the original film, but at the same time, you could tell that the team that worked on this film were anime fans as well. By the film’s last half, I honestly felt like I was watching an episode of Robotech/Macross from the dynamic that was brought up and the threat of scale given their alien adversaries. I’m not saying that was a bad thing as Robotech/Macross still is one of my all-time favorite anime action-dramas.

I’m glad that the special effects and visuals have improved coming into this sequel. I guess they didn’t have enough of a budget this time around to fund making puppets of all of the aliens required to show off their terrifying numbers this time around. For that I don’t blame them as I remember watching the “making of” videos for the original ID4 and it’s was a lot of effort and work to for several puppeteers to move around those aliens for the few scenes that they were in the original film.

I guess no one was thinking about how much damage that alone would have done to the planet long-term...

If I was to knock this film for anything, it was how they retreaded a lot of the familiar territory from the original film. At first, it was cool but by the end of the film it was getting very stale. They had the cliché with no one would heed Goldblum and Pullman’s warnings and foresight for the pending doom, the attacks on public monuments and catastrophic destruction on major cities around the world, and they even recycled Pullman’s speech from the original film just to make him give another in this film. As a result, a lot of the emotions felt by viewers feel forced rather than genuine like they were in the original film.

Watch It, Rent It, or Don’t Bother?

Fans of the original should definitely give this a shot. Everyone else would be better off with a rental when it hits your local Redbox. This film depends on too much knowledge from the original to get what’s going on in this film, especially with all of the references and subtle nods to its predecessor. That being said, you're either going to absolutely hate this film or flat out laugh your ass off and actually have a good time watching it out of nostalgia. Either way, I suggest not going out of your way to see it. This will more likely be on cable TV for free in no time.